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by Bruce Maulden

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Forewarned by the jury

December 9, 2012

Cold and clear again this morning on California’s northern coast with more the same expected for the upcoming work-week. In with the unimpeded and out with the dumb-ass.

Woke up this morning more on the frustrated side, just observing the obvious. Everyone should be aware of the ‘Danger, Will Robinson‘ syndrome as an insight into how the nowadays was already forewarned, but that which is apparently apparent is not so to a shitload of folks, and there’s also a shitload who don’t want to listen.

Yet maybe not: Manny Pacquiao never saw it coming. First three words from the New York Times lede on the Pacquiao/Juan Manuel Marquez boxing match last night in Las Vegas — the problem was Mitt Romney and the woeful-wonderful, clueless shit he says:

Then it got surreal. In came Mitt Romney. Yes, that Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and the presidential runner-up, every hair on his head in place. Romney, in fact, came in twice. His introduction was at once awkward and hilarious. â€œHi, Manny,â€ he said. â€œIâ€™m Mitt Romney. I ran for president. I lost.â€ All that really happened, truth stranger than fiction. Or just another Pacquiao fight.

Odd how someone could overlook the actual situation in hand — be so totally uninterested in what was occurring right in front of him. Romney pulled a similar stunt back in September during a conversation with Jodie Chiarello, who’d “lost everything” (‘everything‘ would include her home) to Hurricane Isaac: “He just told me to, um, there’s assistance out there,” Chiarello said of her conversation with Romney. “He said, go home and call 211.” That’s a public service number offered in many states.

So, then back to the fight, back to the sixth round and picking-up the Times (h/t Balloon Juice): He never saw the punch that snapped his head back Saturday and dropped him to the canvas and left him sprawled there momentarily, face down, while his wife sobbed uncontrollably and the packed crowd at MGMâ€™s Grand Garden Arena rose to its feet in shock.

Shock is fine. Sometimes a good collision with reality makes people think a bit, ponder maybe-as-close-as-possible to the truth of a matter, but across the ugly divide there’s a lot bubbling around out there in the current narrative to confuse the un-shockable, or the hard-case ingrained eat up with self-centered greed, i.e., like the two jump-dumb, mean and nasty Jims — DeMint and Inhofe. Just two weeks ago, Inhofe, a pure, climate-change-denying turd, jumped again at the EPA for giving “…themselves unprecedented powers to regulate American society.â€ Irony is so f*cking lost. Inhofe is so far up his ass, he appeared last week via video-link at the UN climate summit in Doha, Qatar, blubbering the entire talks were just part of a â€œfar left green agendaâ€ that was â€œabout one thing: spreading the wealth around.” He and others of his ilk will most-likely be near-universally loathed in the way-near future, if not by his own grandchildren, then a way-shitload of other people’s grandchildren for not only allowing climate change to progress, but in fact, going out of his way to facilitate the horror. DeMint, of course, announced last week he’d been leaving his Senate seat to take over as head honcho of the Heritage Foundation (reportedly at a salary of $1.1 million). One morally offensive asshole, DeMint’s action reflects the hypocritical, self-centered greed that infects US government — David Sirota at Salon has a good background post up this morning about this money-stink affair. Money quote:

But as a professional politician who has shown a clear interest in leveraging conservative policymaking power, DeMint is almost certainly making the move to increase that power for himself. Indeed, he is now bragging that his new job will put him in â€œa more powerful positionâ€ to shape public policy. How telling that he will accomplish such a goal by moving out of the body that is supposed to make policy.

Are we f*cked, or what?

Now on to some fresh news on an old, old subject.

Happy birthday to Kirk Douglas, the guy turns 96 today.

Amongst the baby-boomer generation, and there’s a way-shitload of us, Douglas was one of the major entertainment figures for a big chunk of our young lives. From the mid 1950s to the late 1960s, he was a popular movie star, appearing in such notables as ‘20000 League Under the Sea‘ (my first memory of him on screen), ‘Lust for Life,’ Douglas played Vincent van Gogh, ‘Gunfight at the OK Corral,’ and two of my all-time favorite movies, of course ‘Spartacus,’ and ‘Seven Days in May,’ a well-turned 1964 political thriller that might have some overtones for nowadays, but instead of the military, it’s the Koch brothers. However, by the end of the 1960s Douglas as a big deal had faded, as witnessed by the ponderous ‘The Arrangement‘ (1969), and Hollywood’s move to the youth market.

And finally, a good report: Gas prices have plummeted 46 cents a gallon over the past two months, according to a survey released Sunday. “This has been a true price crash,” said Trilby Lundberg, publisher of the Lundberg Survey. Out of the blue, no? No.